What the Flock? Exposing Big Tech’s Surveillance State

As spying becomes big business, more people are mobilizing to resist mass surveillance.



A Flock Safety automated license plate reader is seen in Aurora, Colorado on June 27, 2024.
(Photo by Tony Webster/flickr/cc)

Tim Karr
Sep 03, 2026

Common Dreams

For many, Labor Day signifies a time of transition, the end of summer and the return to business as usual, whether it be school or work. But the holiday weekend was born out of a more radical past, and at a place charged with a history of protest and free expression.

On September 5, 1882, more than 10,000 workers sacrificed a day’s pay to march on Union Square and demand an eight-hour workday and an end to child labor. The success of their protest paved the way for Labor Day to become a federal holiday in 1894.

Initially a gated garden enclave for New York’s wealthiest, architects Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux redesigned Union Square in 1872 as an open plaza for public assembly and patriotic demonstration.

By the beginning of the 20th century, Union Square became the epicenter of radical American politics, a setting for protests by anarchists and socialists. Noted activist Emma Goldman frequently used the public plaza to challenge government censorship and advocate for women’s reproductive rights and free speech.
Fenced in by Surveillance Technology

Today, however, Union Square has been fenced in by a barricade of a different sort. Ringing the plaza is a spiky array of cameras, installed on streetlights by a New York Police Department seeking to surveil New Yorkers and anyone else who happens by the square.

The cameras include automatic license-plate recognition technology, which captures data on every car that passes the square down Broadway or across busy 14th Street.

Whether you’re driving to the grocery store for a quart of milk or attending a local No Kings protest, odds are that law enforcement has recorded, processed, and archived your activities for future reference.

Such setups are so ubiquitous to cities and major intersections that they’re easy to dismiss as normal features of a busy streetscape. But that’s changing.

The company that produces many of these surveillance cameras—Flock Group Inc.—has become a focus of concern among activists, advocates, and people of every political stripe who don’t want law enforcement documenting and archiving their every activity.

Spying on the Haystack

But Flock is not alone. Surveilling everyday Americans is now a multibillion-dollar business that’s growing fast.

Flock has struck license-plate reading camera contracts with 7,000 law-enforcement agencies, accounting for 40% of all such departments nationwide. There are more than 130,000 of these cameras deployed across 49 states, likely at a busy intersection or gathering point near you.

Whether you’re driving to the grocery store for a quart of milk or attending a local No Kings protest, odds are that law enforcement has recorded, processed, and archived your activities for future reference.

The philosophy behind such mass surveillance is that authorities need to capture data on everyone’s movements to identify those few who step out of line. It’s as though you need to know the habits of every blade of grass in the haystack to cull out the one wayward needle.

If that’s not disturbing enough, there have also been extensive reports of abuse, including local police officers deploying department surveillance technology to stalk romantic interests—including strangers—while innocent people have been thrown in jail based on a misread license plate or an inaccurate biometric scan.

“The constant and ongoing surveillance of people in public places raises serious First and Fourth Amendment concerns,” says Jenna Ruddock, Free Press’ advocacy director. “Even decisions about where to install these cameras map onto well-established practices of racist policing, aside from the fact that facial-detection technology has an alarming track record when attempting to identify people of color.”

Mass Surveillance Is Big Business

Still, more major tech companies are getting in on the expanding surveillance business. Powerful artificial intelligence companies are marketing AI-enabled video analytics with facial-recognition capacities for real-time threat detection (think Minority Report).

And while Meta doesn’t directly market its Ray-Ban smart glasses to law enforcement, local police departments and immigration agencies have been buying them in bulk via Amazon.

For its part, Amazon is chasing multimillion-dollar contracts to provide law enforcement with cloud infrastructure for data storage, analytics, and biometric systems, including more than $250 million from the Department of Homeland Security to host many of the databases and systems used to track, monitor, and deport immigrants.

Though he once promised that he wouldn’t allow anyone to use company technology to harm people, Google CEO Sundar Pichai is now seeking to profit from mass surveillance. The company is already doing business with Immigration and Customs Enforcement while vying with Amazon and other tech giants for government cloud-computing contracts. Google is also under contract to provide the tech at the center of federal projects to upgrade the “virtual wall” that surveils US borders.

Lost to the Surveillance State

As more cameras sprout up in more locations, the movement to oppose such government spying is spreading. Dozens of cities across the country have cut ties with Flock over their residents’ data-privacy concerns. People have flocked to public hearings and city council meetings to pressure local elected officials to turn the cameras off. Some have taken matters into their own hands, covering nearby Flock and other surveillance cameras with trash bags—or even cutting down camera-attached light poles with electric saws.

DeFlock, an anti-surveillance activist group, has been mapping locations of Flock and other cameras nationwide. (This author used this tool to identify the many non-Flock surveillance cameras surrounding Union Square).

In August, privacy advocates organized the DeFlock National Week of Action, which featured a series of protests, town halls, and informational events to oppose automated license-plate readers and other mass surveillance technology.

The pushback against local surveillance cameras is occurring alongside the fast-spreading movement to stop the unchecked construction of data centers. There’s a common culprit in both popular uprisings: the unholy alliances struck between Big Tech and government. Others are rightfully suspicious of the billionaire class pushing the rapid, reckless development of advanced AI and surveillance tools without first seeking the consent of surrounding communities.

In Union Square on a recent Monday, I asked local busker Lawrence Kidwell whether he knew what all of the nearby police cameras were about. “The NYPD just wants to listen to my music,” he said.

Perhaps. But the cameras are also in place to discourage other forms of expression and muzzle voices of dissent. Something that Union Square has long welcomed may become lost to the new deprivations of the surveillance state.

This piece was originally published at Pressing Issues.


Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.


Tim Karr
Tim Karr is a senior director at Free Press, the U.S.-based organization that advocates for more just and democratic media.
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It’s Not Just Flock. Police Can’t Be Trusted With Our Data.


An Illinois State Police database available online listed personal information, including Social Security numbers.

By Brian Dolinar , 

Truthout

September 3, 2026

Illinois State Police stand guard while monitoring protesters gathering near an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Broadview, Illinois, on October 4, 2025.OCTAVIO JONES / AFP via Getty Images

A growing movement has been campaigning against surveillance cameras from companies like Flock Safety, which allow local police to gather mass surveillance data, often citing the possibility of misuse of that data. But for years police have steadily been building a digital infrastructure with personal information on people with criminal backgrounds in the name of public safety — and often without proper digital security

Since 2020, the state police in Illinois have maintained a publicly accessible online map of 30,000 people that it has labeled as “offenders” in 685 nursing homes across the state. The map included the first and last names, dates of birth, home addresses, phone numbers, FBI numbers, and Social Security numbers of people listed. These are elderly people who are vulnerable to scammers. It’s not stated what they have been convicted of. They may have a drug charge from decades ago before marijuana was legalized in Illinois, but their past still follows them.

Matt Chapman, a researcher with the Chicago-based Lucy Parsons Labs, stumbled across the map when he was researching license plate readers maintained by the Illinois State Police (ISP). “Anybody can find this,” Chapman told Truthout. “Anybody can use this for nefarious purposes.”

“Why do these agencies have all this information?” Chapman questioned. “Why are they not protecting it? It really speaks to the lack of care that Illinois State Police have for the information of sensitive folks — the people they’re supposedly supposed to protect.”
Registries, Databases, and Shackles

As police build an increasingly sophisticated surveillance apparatus, they have been shown to be poor stewards of the mass amounts of information they collect on the public. Police have also wrongly entered people into gang databases. In 2020, a scandal erupted in Los Angeles after cops there falsified records in a gang database, which led to the suspension of several officers with the city’s police department. Last year, Kilmar Abrego Garcia was sent to CECOT, the mega-prison in El Salvador, after Immigration and Customs Enforcement accessed information from a disgraced Maryland cop who put him into a gang database linking him to M-13 for wearing a hoodie and Chicago Bulls baseball cap.


What DeFlock? A Week of Action Confronts the AI Surveillance State
A Kansas activist discovered that police tracked him with Flock-style cameras after he wrote an op-ed criticizing them. By Mike Ludwig , Truthout/TheAppeal August 19, 2026

In 2021, Protocol, a company owned by BI Incorporated (a subsidiary of the private prison builder GEO Group), which supplies the Cook County Sheriff’s Office with electronic monitors, leaked the personal information of thousands of people across Chicago wearing the devices, what expert James Kilgore calls “ankle shackles.” Chapman, who also uncovered this data leak, said it included “an enormous amount of private information,” such as names, email and home addresses, and the “detailed movement schedules” of people on these digital tracking devices.


“Any scammer could have an absolute field day with this data.”

States have been expanding the use of registries to track individuals — most commonly people convicted of sexual offenses, but also those found guilty of murder, arson, methamphetamine production, and other crimes. In Kansas City, a multi-jurisdictional police operation recently rounded up nearly 100 people on the state sex offender registry who were living within 1,000 feet of a school, which is a violation. Police claimed they were protecting children heading back to school. Thirty years after they were first established, research shows there is little proof that registries make people safer.

Last year, a company that sells an app to monitor the phones of people convicted of sex offenses had the information publicly leaked in what a hacker called “one of the easiest” breaches they had ever done.

Formerly Incarcerated People Still Have Rights

The map of 30,000 names, which the Illinois State Police took down after being notified about it by Truthout, was an interactive map of nursing homes across the state. Nursing home facilities in Illinois are mandated by law to do background screenings and notify the Illinois Department of Public Health (IDPH) of what are referred to as “identified offenders.” The department is then supposed to alert the Illinois State Police, who conduct an investigation and assess the risk.

Alan Mills, an attorney at Kaplan & Grady who advocates for incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people, told Truthout: “That has meant that a lot of nursing homes simply won’t take anybody with a criminal history, and that has been a real serious problem for people getting out of prison.”


“The sharing of private information about thousands of Illinois nursing home residents is a violation of state law.”

To his knowledge, there is no stipulation that this personal information be made publicly available — and especially no justification for publicizing Social Security numbers. “That sounds completely outrageous and has nothing to do with public safety,” said Mills.

As the IDPH website states, the program is ostensibly meant to “prevent abuse and promote the safety” of its residents and staff. The release of this private data about “identified offenders” raises the question — what about the safety and abuse of those with criminal histories who are living in nursing homes?

“Convicted felons still deserve privacy rights,” said Cooper Quintin, Senior Staff Technologist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The list includes people who were born in the 1940s — far more likely to struggle with technology and be vulnerable to harm, rather than causing it themselves. “Any scammer could have an absolute field day with this data,” Quintin told Truthout.

“They haven’t even taken the basic steps here to secure this data,” said Quintin. “It’s open on the internet to anyone, and that’s just incredibly irresponsible.”
“Trust Us”

This breach could be dismissed as a clerical mistake. It could be claimed that laws are failing to keep up with increasingly sophisticated technology. But this pretty simple violation throws into question whether police can be trusted with our information.

In an email to Truthout, Benjamin Ruddell, a lawyer and director of criminal justice policy at the ACLU of Illinois, stated:


The sharing of private information about thousands of Illinois nursing home residents is a violation of state law. Illinois residents should be able to trust that ISP would take seriously its legal duty to secure personal information that could be exploited to do real harm — including identity theft, stigmatization, fraud, or harassment of thousands of people across the state. In recent years, we have been told repeatedly that we must trust law enforcement with ever-increasing surveillance capabilities — often enabled with artificial intelligence — to collect an ever-increasing volume of data about all of us to enhance public safety. This example shows that their mishandling of this surveillance data has the potential to make people less, not more, safe.


“The Illinois State Police … should immediately halt its expansion of its statewide surveillance infrastructure.”

Truthout reached out to inform Illinois State Police about the map, and the Illinois State Police responded to the data breach by immediately removing the map from their website. According to the Illinois Personal Information Protection Act, any state agency that collects personal information on an Illinois resident must notify them of a data breach within 45 days and provide notice to the attorney general.

When asked for comment, Melaney Arnold, the chief public information officer for the Illinois State Police, told Truthout: “This specific dashboard was initially created as part of an internal pilot data source and it was not intended for public dissemination. The data has been decommissioned and is no longer accessible to the public. ISP is in the process of notifying impacted parties.”

“With how trivial it was to find,” said Chapman, who is the first known person to have found the information online, “it fills me with dread knowing that the Illinois State Police have no idea what information it’s exposing to the public — they’re simply not looking. ISP should immediately halt its expansion of its statewide surveillance infrastructure and any agency in Illinois that works with ISP should truly reconsider whether their trust in a such a reckless agency is justified.”



This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the terms of the license.

Brian Dolinar
Brian Dolinar is an independent journalist based in Urbana, Illinois. His articles have appeared at The Appeal, In These Times, The Nation, and Truthout. You can follow his stories by subscribing to his Substack newsletter called “Sentences.”

Resistance to Flock Cameras and Police Surveillance Is Exploding

Backlash to Flock cameras and AI systems is exploding after scandals, including police using the tech to stalk women.

By Mike Ludwig , 

Truthout

May 22, 2026

Protesters rally against the use of Flock cameras on April 3, 2026, outside City Hall in Troy, NY.

Jim Franco / Times Union via Getty Images

In communities large and small, red and blue, all across the United States, residents are filling local council meetings in opposition to the explosive growth of high-tech police surveillance systems.

Local movements to rid city streets of AI-powered surveillance cameras and Automated License Plate Recognition (ALPR) networks used by law enforcement are growing rapidly amid scandals, mounting privacy concerns, and public backlash to AI and mass surveillance under the authoritarian Trump administration. The cameras and their associated systems are capable of building complex profiles of people and vehicles as they move through public areas.

Last week inside a packed city council chamber in Asheville, North Carolina, residents who had waited hours to share a public comment chanted “Shame! Shame! Shame!” as their elected leaders voted 6-1 to build a “real-time intelligence center” for local police. Unless the city changes course, police will soon have a “wall of screens” fed by high-tech cameras to monitor a city of 95,000 people.

In Bandera, Texas, a pro-surveillance councilmember proposed banning “cell phones, the internet, cameras, and nearly all technology” in retaliation after his colleagues in the small town voted 3-2 to end its contract with the surveillance company Flock Safety after months of debate, according to 404 Media. Residents were enraged after the town installed eight Flock license plate cameras with AI, which were damaged by vandals.

In Troy, New York, heated controversy over Flock cameras led the Republican mayor to declare a “state of emergency” to keep using the technology. The city council is now suing the mayor over her declaration as it considers putting legislative limits on the cameras. In Cleveland, Ohio, records unearthed by journalists this week show 160 immigration-related searches in Flock audit logs over a month-long period of the city’s Flock camera and surveillance drone network. The revelation comes months after city officials assured residents that protections were in place to prevent such searches and keep Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) from exploiting the data for President Trump’s mass deportation campaign.


Ring Scraps Flock Partnership Following Uproar Over Super Bowl AI Commercial
There is still “reason to distrust” the company, one security expert said, warning it has backtracked on plans before. By Chris Walker , Truthout  February 17, 2026

The push against Flock cameras, drones, and AI-powered surveillance in local communities comes in the wake of reported abuses by law enforcement, including the sharing of local surveillance data with the Trump administration to target immigrants for deportation.

In at least 16 recent cases, local police officers lost their jobs after accessing license plate reader data to stalk ex-partners or other romantic interests, according to the Institute for Justice. Internal investigations uncovered the abuse in only a few cases. Most of the cases came to light after victims reported the offending officers’ behavior to other police.

“A year ago, people really hadn’t heard of Flock,” said Patrick Conant, founder of the Asheville-based transparency group Sunshine Labs, in an interview. “But with increased media coverage, and rising concern about surveillance tech in general, a lot more people are all of sudden paying attention.”
A New Era of AI Surveillance

Often funded by federal grants promoting surveillance, thousands of police departments across the United States have installed ALPR networks with cameras that automatically capture images of every car that passes by, along with a timestamp. The data feeds into searchable platforms integrated with AI, allowing police to easily identify and track vehicles by license plates as well as dents, roof racks, and bumper stickers — all without a warrant.

The most well-known and controversial systems are built by Flock Safety, which is increasingly finding itself on the wrong side of public opinion.

Flock systems gather data to create a digital “Vehicle Fingerprint” for individual drivers that can be fed into proprietary, searchable artificial intelligence systems. In many cases, ALPR data can be accessed by dozens of law enforcement agencies outside of a local area without a warrant — including out-of-state police departments and federal agencies.

Flock’s systems are powerful. In 2025, 404 Media revealed that a local sheriff’s office in Texas used 83,000 ALPRs and 6,809 Flock camera networks across multiple states to track one woman suspected of self-managing an abortion with medication, which is standard care but banned in Texas. An officer used Flock in an attempt to track the woman as far as Illinois and Washington, where abortion is legal and protected by law.

Citing denials from the sheriff’s office in Texas, Flock initially called the story “misreporting” and “clickbait.” However, documents show the woman was indeed targeted for self-managing abortion on behalf of an allegedly abusive ex-partner who attempted to press criminal charges.

Flock Safety claims its surveillance networks are not “mass surveillance.” The company says most data collected is deleted on a set schedule, but critics point out that data and camera footage is retained to train AIs and even sent overseas to be reviewed by gig workers.

Flock Safety casts its technology as critical tools for fighting “crime,” and for police, surveillance networks are quickly becoming viewed as an industry standard — the sort of high-tech toys that every police department wants, and which federal and state grants often significantly subsidize.

However, civil rights attorneys argue Flock’s vehicle fingerprinting violates the Constitution’s protection against “unreasonable searches” by the government. For example, in San Jose, California, residents are suing the city under the Fourth Amendment over its network of nearly 500 ALPRs that allows any police officer to track an individual’s movement across the city for 30 days at a time without a warrant.

A notable legal challenge to ALPR surveillance comes from Norfolk, Virginia, where police have installed more than 170 Flock cameras since 2023. The complaint filed in federal court on behalf of two residents argues the surveillance system creates a “detailed map of the driver’s movements.” The local police chief boasted that it “would be difficult to drive anywhere of any distance without running into a camera somewhere.”

Federal judge Mark Davis ruled in late January that there was insufficient evidence to declare Norfolk’s surveillance system an unconstitutional invasion of privacy. However, citing previous privacy cases, Davis warned ALPRs could cross the legal threshold with technological advancements in the future, without detailing what those advancements might be.

The plaintiffs are appealing the ruling, marking the first time a Flock challenge has found its way up the federal court system. The Institute for Justice is representing the plaintiffs in both San Jose and Norfolk with its Plate Privacy Project, which helps “everyday people fight back against warrantless mass surveillance,” according to Michael Soyfer, an attorney for the group.

“Our clients and all people who drive through Norfolk should not be subjected to this warrantless mass surveillance, which is why they’re fighting back against the city’s ALPR system,” Soyfer told Truthout in an email.
An Anti-Surveillance Movement Rising

DeFlock, a group that tracks and does public education around the surveillance technology, recently announced a nationwide “week of action against ALPRs” that will begin on August 16. Members of Lucy Parsons Labs, an anti-surveillance collective involved in the organizing, said momentum behind the week of action is growing rapidly.

“Over the last year, we’ve seen thousands of people demanding that their elected officials remove these cameras,” Lucy Parson Labs members said in a collective statement. “We’re seeing with more clarity what these systems are. These technologies don’t deliver safety. In fact, they make us all less safe.”

As public backlash grows, local leaders nationwide are reconsidering contracts with Flock. At least 68 cities have canceled contracts with Flock so far, according to DeFlock. However, some cities are simply replacing Flock cameras with those made by competitors in response to public pushback.

For example, in Asheville, a city that frequently touts its progressive values, the city council is attempting to appease worried residents without scrapping plans for the “real-time” police surveillance center. During its May 12 meeting, the council passed a broadly worded resolution affirming civil liberties, and at least one councilor has told residents that the number of ALPRs would eventually be reduced from the 11 Flock cameras currently deployed by the police department to “potentially one.”

However, the city council also voted to accept a federal grant secured by a Republican senator for the surveillance center and secure a multi-year contract with Flock competitor Axon. Kim Roney, a mayoral candidate and the only councilmember to vote against the measures, said she opposed “AI-fueled, for-profit surveillance tech in Asheville” due to the community’s unanswered questions about unforeseen costs, data protection, and constitutional privacy rights.

“Tech companies exist to profit from data collection,” Roney said in an email. “In the absence of the pending service agreement contract, I reached out to Electronic Frontier Foundation. They warned that any resolution that claims to protect local data is null when the state and federal government do not allow cities to withhold data, plus there are unanswered questions as to which entity owns derivative data.”

Patrick Conant said activists are reviewing Axon’s contracts with other cities in order to gain an understanding of how a contract with Asheville might work.

“The general sentiment I am hearing from a lot of folks is that they were not aware that our city was using all of these tools, and they would like to know about what is already in place and what safeguards exist for what is in use, and they want to know more before they expand the system,” Conant said. “They are proceeding with accepting federal grants and directing the city manager to negotiate contracts before the full terms are available.”

However, Conant said the Asheville residents who showed up to oppose the police surveillance center were not deflated after the city council voted to accept the federal grant and surveillance contract. Instead, after waiting hours to share a public comment before the council, people gathered outside to discuss next steps.

“I’ve seen people continue to organize and connect, people are going to do more community forums, and people of course are saying, ‘how do we vote out the people who are in favor of this,’” Conant said. “And that is what we have been doing since that meeting.”

A Tale of Two Maydays

Richard Moser

 May 16, 2025
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Illustration of the first American Labor parade held in New York City on September 5, 1882 as it appeared in the September 16, 1882 issue of Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper.

Mayday is a holiday dedicated to international working-class solidarity.

Born in the United States on May 1, 1886, during a time of intense class conflict, Mayday became the recognized labor holiday worldwide. However, it has rarely been celebrated in the US since the beginning of the first Cold War. The largest Maydays in recent history were organized not by unions but by the peace movement in 1971, by immigrant workers in 2006, and the Occupy movement in 2012.

The original May Day was created by a huge mass movement and coordinated strike wave aimed at winning the eight-hour day — at a time when 60- to 80-hour workweeks were both common and deadly. Over 300,000 went on strike across the country. In Chicago, the center of the movement, anarchists, socialists, and union activists organized more than 40,000 to strike. Albert and Lucy Parsons led the Knights of Labor and 100,000 in a peaceful parade marking the first Mayday march. 

A few days later, on May 4, a much smaller rally was organized to protest police violence. As the cops rushed the stage, a bomb exploded. Those responsible for the blast have never been identified. The best-known leaders were rounded up, and four, including Albert Parsons, were hanged for a crime they did not commit. The anarchists were murdered for their ideas and leadership. 

During the late 19th Century, big ideas were widely discussed among everyday people. The biggest question they raised: Was capitalism the best system for running society, or was the new idea of socialism or anarchism a better alternative?

This is the tradition of Mayday, and it’s worth defending.

Mayday 2025

2025 was easily the largest Mayday in my lifetime, and the people prevailed, making it the best as well. Thousands of marchers remained true to its traditions as an international day of labor solidarity. 

The peace movement and calls to end the genocide in Palestine easily outnumbered the pro-war forces, which were quite visible in earlier “Hands Off” marches. ICE and its police state infrastructure were roundly condemned. The Vermont AFL-CIO urged labor to become “Strike Ready” to resist fascism. The rank and file raised positive issues — health care being the most popular. The opposition was there. The rank-and-file marchers made it a May Day to be proud of.

Most importantly, immigrant workers played a leading role in the streets. The last time Mayday was really big was in 2006, when Latino immigrants led a one-day general strike called the  “Great American Boycott.” Approximately one million people in 50 US cities participated in one of the largest days of protest in American history. The voices of that Mayday are still heard today.

Mayday and the Machine

Mayday was so large, in part, because it was sanctioned by the Democrats through their loyal organizations. This carefully permitted event was without a disruptive police presence, let alone the kind of brutality student protesters faced on Mayday 2024. Perhaps that allowed people to feel safe and was part of the reason the people, including the most vulnerable, showed up in such large numbers.

The size of the protest is all the more remarkable because most US unions rarely celebrated Mayday, sticking instead to the parades and picnics of Labor Day in September. To point to Trump’s very real threat against workers is obvious, true, and certainly speaks to the motivation of the rank and file. But does this embrace of Mayday mean a new, more class-conscious labor movement is being born? Time will tell, but the long, steady love affair between most labor officials and the Democrats casts that into serious doubt. This would hardly be the first time that the rank and file have run ahead of the official leaders.

The Democratic Party’s support for Mayday is truly unprecedented. Does it mean that the day to celebrate international working-class solidarity was actually organized by a political party dominated by big-money oligarchs and guilty of an ongoing genocide? Are we to believe that something historic is afoot, or is this a replay of the Democrats’ embrace of MLK Day — while undermining everything King ever stood for? Are the Democrats really going for the billionaires’ throat, or is this just get-out-the-vote?

Mayday 2025 was partly the work of loyal Democratic groups, such as 50501 and Indivisible. Maybe that is why some of the Mayday events seemed to vary little from the early Hands-Off rallies—all anti-Trump without a systematic critique or a positive program, but with a leadership hiding Palestine and supporting NATO and the war machine.

The Democratic Party’s version of Mayday was most famously represented by its evangelist extraordinaire: Senator Sanders. His ongoing attempts to redeem the Democrats are a self-described move to “strengthen American Democracy where faith in both the Democratic and Republican Parties is extremely low.” Now, would a leader true to the tradition of Mayday make it a day to challenge the system or prop it up?

All Sanders has to do to reclaim Mayday is say the following words: “The Israeli genocide against the Palestinian people could not have happened without the support and consent of the US government. I urge you to do everything you can to bring an end to genocide.” And, “We will never have leverage against the Democrats or Republicans until we create a real opposition and a credible threat of exit. I urge you to support and join the third party of your choice.” 

The redemption of the party of war, genocide, and austerity is not a price we have to pay for resisting Trump’s fascism. Genocide is fascism at its most evil. Redeeming the Democrats is just pushing lesser evil thinking to its final, lowest possible point — the lesser of two evil fascisms. Has it really come to that? Not if the tradition of Mayday holds.

What Are Workers To Make Of Dual Maydays?

The great Black intellectual W.E.B. Du Bois and Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci helped us to unlock the secrets of our collective mind with the concept of dual consciousness. We all have to contend with a volatile blend of ruling-class and oppositional ideas that make up what we believe to be “reality” or “common sense,” and even our sense of ourselves.

“It is a peculiar sensation, this double consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of the world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.”

– W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folks

This contradictory common sense allows for, and sometimes even encourages our resistance— just so long as we understand ourselves “through the eyes of others,” just so long as we accommodate ourselves to the established order in the end. 

The trap is set, and it will lure us in as long as Marx’s observation remains true: “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas.” The idea that the problem is far greater than Trump—that a system of corporate power and empire managed by both ruling parties produced him and his fascism—bursts the bounds of ruling class thinking. 

The loyal left serves the existing order by diluting working-class consciousness with partisan loyalty, disciplining the movement to the machine. More than that, the loyalists who tried to steer Mayday into safe channels had one overriding effect: to make independent action by the working class seem inconceivable. But is it?

The Mayday marchers might just be harbingers of a real opposition. They hinted at what we should all know deep in our bones: the ruling class is neither pre-ordained nor eternal. Their rule is historical, and history is far from over. As we build a genuine opposition, our goal is to learn to think and act for ourselves. Mayday was a success not because of the intention of its leaders but because it may have helped unleash the forces of change. I double-dog dare the same leaders to call a general strike.

On Mayday, we recognize ourselves as a class of the vast majority who, through our labors, produce all wealth. We are aligned against Capital in whatever form big money takes. In our time, corporations and their merger with the state is the nursery for all oligarchs and all forms of fascism. 

Only by our actions can we legitimately claim to represent the aspirations of all people for a better life, from the concrete demands of daily life to the lofty goal of liberation.

Richard Moser writes at befreedom.co where this article first appeared.